Blizz

Avengers Academy: X of Swords ⚔️

Leah Jordan

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Location: Contest of Champions
Gear:
Skills:

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Was she made of rocks?

"I don't know what the fuck I'm made of, anymore. But you're gonna have to try harder than that to find out, you hit like a wet shoe." Leah barely felt those fists, she felt the crunch of skin against skin more. And then she turned around and pivoted all her weight onto one leg, whirling the other around to batter Thuy with a roundhouse kick. Her foot collided with Thuy's nose, eliciting a sound like a gunshot, and she watched the demonic whore get sent backwards and land flat on her ass. She didn't seem quick to get back up.

"I warned you. I fucking warned you, you ignorant fucking maniacal little shit. But you got right back up."

Leah wanted to keep attention on herself so the less sturdy members of her team wouldn't get focused. If talking like an egotistical jackass helped, then great. Psychological warfare was still warfare.

"Luna, Hotshot, fucking GET HER ASS!!!"

They were starting to get an advantage over the Hex Girls. That was good, and if they could keep Dorian safe while he was brainfucking one of them, even better.

Leah took a step back and gave Tatiana a nasty look. "Come on, then. You want a fist fight? I'll give you a fucking fist fight."

Stats

Leah:

• Health: 41/60
• Focus: 30/60
• Karma: 2/2
• Notes:
  • Edge when attacking with Smash.
• Action:
  Leah rolled 6 + 1 + 3 + 4 = 19, which hits.
  
  [6 × 4 + 4 + 2] ×2 = 60 damage and Thuy is knocked prone, except Thuy has elemental protection up so you fo break her fire shield and she is fine but defenseless.

Strange Academy: Journey into Mystery

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Location: Hall of Ancients, Strange Academy
Grimoire:
Skills:
Current Outfit

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Tree. Rohan wasn't fond of being called that. Much as he lived among the natural world and was hounded by it, he came to this school full of wizards so he wouldn't be overwhelmed by the curse and turn into something monstrous. Not that Cal knew as much, but it still irked him.

"Yeah, that's me," He turned around and put on a grin. It was good a newer student was put with students who actually knew their way around the place. Less so that of those just happened to be the horny man-dragon of the school. He didn't even mind Callaghan that much. He was pretty decent with magic and his ability to turn into other things was awfully relevant for the sorts of things Rohan focused on when he had the spare time to study what being human actually entailed on a mystical level. But the guy was just obnoxious in his propensity to fuck everything alive and legal, like the witch brothers who ran the Neverish.

Cass seemed pretty damn eager to decorate. Meanwhile, Rohan had just sat his things down and considered resting until it was time to head out. He knew what was happening tonight as well. He fell onto his bed and lazily waved a hand. The bed shifted colors and magically warmed to above ambient temperature. A small, circular table of ironwood appeared beside the table where he deposited a notebook from under the layers of his clothes.

"You can keep changing just about anything in here," Rohan explained, touching the walls behind him to tint them a few hues darker for the sake of less eye strain. "The walls, the furniture- The space doesn't change, since that'd be more costly and magic isn't free, but you can keep changing it whenever you feel like doing so."

When the letter slid under the floor, Rohan didn't bother with it. He'd been before, it was a good place to be. Safe from the aberrations outdoors, firmly in the territory of Man, and the caffeine was something special.

"I'll see what I've got to throw on when it gets a bit later," Rohan decided. "If you can't find the entrance yourself, ask someone. You should know, though, that one of the brothers who runs the place is an enchanter. He can change how a person thinks and manipulate them. The other just plays tricks. Don't cause trouble and you'll be fine, but it's worth keeping that in mind. If something bad did happen, well, I've got a magic staff for that."

The wooden owl croaked, philosophically, as if it had something to add. It didn't.

Inspo

Table
Bed

X-Men: GenetiX

Everything was becoming a black void. Sound was filling every nanoscopic stretch of this space, all while iceberg-sized chunks fell to reveal the color of the night without stars. The noise was a scream in a voice that lacked a pitch, lacked a voice and a frequency. It could be perceived and not heard, one could only know that it was occurring.

It was strange, the way treating someone with the bare minimum of human decency could change somebody. Stranger still was the gap between what happened in Umbra’s head and what came after.

Human language did not possess a word for the feeling, for humans could not feel anything when they were dead. Its closest proximity would be to call it sleep.

On the outside, it was more simple. The body of Andrew Becker ceased to scream, and collapsed like a doll made of yarn. There was nothing, not even the sound of running footsteps. But in a place only telepaths could go, ot was a much different situation. Ryder and Charles had felt a brain stop functioning from its own perspective. It was different from feeling a consciousness blink off the radar, it was like feeling everything someone felt as their brain began to go offline, while still fully aware until the final second.

By all rights, they should have been snuffed out with him. Their own minds, stuck in his skull, might have been dashed to nothing all the same.

But the last words Umbra heard were not a lie.

Xavier’s mind was shunted back into him. A bit of a rough landing, resting in certain facets of thought not fully settling back in initially, before righting themselves. The feeling was not dissimilar from sharing a mental space with Ryder; Oppressive, imperious, the furthest from gentle.

She came back entire seconds after him.

There wasn’t a scornful glare on her face. Just a tired frown. Ryder dusted herself off, raised her improvised rifle and burnt a hole through the face of what used to be Andrew Becker. Just to be absolutely clear.

And then, she lowered it.

The guards had been ordered to stand down earlier. No one was coming.

”Let’s go home.”

Avengers Academy: X of Swords ⚔️

Leah Jordan

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Location: Contest of Champions
Gear:
Skills:

---

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Fire, screaming, lightning. Excelsior was a team that came together out of chaos, made by a bunch of teenagers with more issues than the DCU, and involved Danni fucking Kingston. The arena was going chaotic with all the fire and wizard bullshit being thrown around. Leah could hear the enemy team's composure breaking down every time Thuy wailed like a rabid banshee. Good. A big fight like this was akin to chess, in a sense. One or two pieces being taken away here or there meant nothing for either side until the board started to look sparse. They were down two, Excelsior was down one. But on top of that, they were starting to sweat. Leah's next target was their heaviest hitter still on the battlefield.

Leah slipped in behind Andy when the blonde bitch ate the sort of punch that knocked her out once, and made a blind guess through the dark fire swirling around her. She was a boxer, and one of the most base, foundational lessons was to never let an opponent be anywhere than in front of you. Never let the other guy have access to your side, because that was enough to effectively halve what someone could do.

She swung a right hook and felt something crunch. Her punch landed straight where the wanted to, right where Thuy's liver was.

A sufficient punch to a place like that was enough to knock some people clean out, cause vomiting or full body spasms. It was like the reset button for normal humans who weren't prepared for it, the nervous system just didn't know what to do immediately after. Thuy clearly wasn't a normal human, and Leah watched her stumble over in a daze. Knowing her, they wouldn't have long to capitalize on it.

"Don't fucking get up, bitch," She warned.

Stats

Leah:

• Health: 52/60
• Focus: 35/60
• Karma: 2/2
• Notes:
  • Edge when attacking with Smash.
• Action:
  Leah rolled 4 1 1, as this attack has edge the right-most 1 is rerolled and became a 6, meaning this attack is 4 1 6 = 16 + 4 (melee) = 20. Thuy’s melee defense is a 11, so this is a Fantastic success.
  
  Leah spent 10 points of Focus, meaning a +5 is added to her damage modifier. This brings her focus from 45 to 35.
  
  The damage is 6 x 4 + 9 = 24 + 9 = 33. But since this is a Fantastic success, the damage is doubled to 66 points of damage, and Thuy is stunned for one round.

✨ Under Black Stars ✨

Once, when first teaching Annika about the cosmology of everything around them, Jack framed it with the lens of Earth's seasons. There were places reminiscent of Spring, in which life flourished and was emphatically new. Nebulae that recently collapsed with metaphysical beings actively taking shape, demiurgical planes under construction. There were places of Winter, barren and forgotten, with memories waiting to be thawed and reintroduced to the world. Under that analogy, the Everdark was Autumn. It changed, it shifted, and so many things came into a place where they were on a threshold between one chapter and the other. All things come, and all things go, he would say. That was, in many ways, what made this realm and life itself beautiful.

There was a fourth element of this analogy that Jack had taught to her. Summer.

It was not the shadows that answered Annika's question. It wasn't even the house itself, it was something else. She images she saw began to race forward. Through her years spent in this place, it was easy to make out the face of a young Jack Hawthorne among the reflections. A look far less tired, scars more pronounced, less of the wise and imperious image she knew he presented to the world. He's not much older than her in those afterimages, and in a scarce few, he isn't alone.

There's someone else in them, a young man his age, and he's brighter than Jack. There's a contrast, where he's in tune with the watercolor imagery Annika can see, and this stranger is sharper, more defined.

The images in the shadows give way until there's something at the very end of the hall. A hatch made of wood, set into the floor and reinforced with bars of iron. There's a light underneath it, leaking out into the environment.

And the light is warm.

Strange Academy: Journey into Mystery

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Location: Hall of Ancients, Strange Academy
Grimoire:
Skills:
Current Outfit

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---

It was easy to forget the value of simple things when you had them on a regular basis. A roof over your head, four walls insulated to keep the cold out, a place that probably didn't have predators watching it every waking moment of the day... Taking such things for granted was practically second nature to people who lived among civilization. Rohan, spending so long away from civilization, was often grateful for the things no ordinary person would flinch at. A warm shower felt like finding Atlantis to him, or seeing an old friend after a long time. Out in the woods, there weren't water heaters. One had to jump in a river and dry off in the sun. When dirt got in Rohan's hair, he used an ungodly mixture of animal fat and the finest ash from a fire, mixed with water to sort that out. Used properly, it could strip paint from metal and take off layers of skin.

It was the first thing Rohan took care of when he found his dorm and made sure no one else had the same idea. He stepped back in without looking like he just crawled out of a hole in the ground. His familiar stood statue-still on the back of a chair, looking up at him. Root had the disposition of an old man, sometimes. He sat down and didn't move, and didn't take kindly to anyone other than Rohan bothering him. He gave Rohan an inscrutable look, and made creaking sound.

"Yeah, I know." He opened up the wardrobe and started setting magic items inside, rather than clothes. He had few of those, enough to fit in one of the packs he brought with him, which he sat on the bottom inside the door.

Avengers Academy: X of Swords ⚔️

Leah Jordan

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Location: Contest of Champions
Gear:
Skills:

---

---

April wasn't doing great, and thankfully someone had her covered. The Hex Girls were really starting to lean on the squishier teammates, and Leah wasn't having that. Their magic wasn't easy to contain, with projections flickering in and out and waves of fire hitting them. They had more cohesion than Leah's team, but then again, their team supposedly didn't have people get disqualified for drugs, drop off, or fuck off to other planets. Dorian was doing a good job for strategy, giving a scattered team a plan. And, thinking of herself as a strategist, Leah agreed with what he was calling out. She'd have to talk to him after they fucking annihilated these bitches.

Then Sabine went down. Shit.

That was bad for two reasons. The first being that Sabine was their psychic, who could read their minds and turn them against each other and foil teamwork.

The second was that it pissed Leah off.

They needed to go on the offensive anyway.

"Luna! With me!"

Leah dropped low and pushed off the ground. There was a small dust cloud left in her way as, for a brief half-second, she was fucking flying. Her right hand curled into a fist and cracked hard across Thelma's nose. She was right in front of Thelma now, and she was going to take up as much of the whore's attention as was possible to give Andy a window to put her on her back.

And not in the fun way.

Stats

Leah:

• Health: 52/60
• Focus: 45/60
• Karma: 2/2
• Notes:
  • Edge when attacking with Smash.
• Action:
  Leah spends 10 Focus on Smash, dealing 29 damage to Thelma.

Camp Athens - Closed

Azariah Willow Child of Hecate * Bar

When no one was looking at him in favor of their drinks, their next hookups for the night, or the floor after their last drink was a bit too much, Azariah slipped away from the bar. Out into the cold in a male form, he was ready stay in bed this time and get to know things better tomorrow. He’d gone light on the drinks, where everyone else would be strung out with a migraine that would give angels pause. That, or they’d sleep till the later half of the day from the trip here. By morning, Azariah would be wide awake and ready to do… Something. What, exactly, he wasn't sure. The rumors around this place were that the gods had designs for them, and that involved a gathering here in preparation.

Gods were fickle creatures.

Finding his way back to the cabin he chose, Azariah grabbed the Staff of Control by the front door and started putting things up for the day; He'd left here in a hurry after his little meeting with Chariselle. He liked to carry most of his magical bits and bobs and whatnots on his person. Small stones of strange colors, with fibers of something or another woven like nets around them with tokens hanging off of them. His Familiar Charms. Each one summoned some kind of creature that had their own tricks. Azariah didn't use them often, but they'd likely come in handy. He began laying them out, removing them from his neck and wrists.

A red stone with feathers knotted together, for a brusque harpy. A green stone with a perfectly preserved sprig of pine, to summon a clever dryad. An opalescent blue, for a siren. And then came all the other little trinkets he hoped to one day enchant into something truly magical. A ring from a boy back home who he robbed out of vindication years back, a marble he found in a ditch... A piece of bone from an animal he couldn't make heads or tails of. Around his neck was a silver chain, with various pendants from rich people he knotted to it with threads from the shirt of a woman's favorite shirt who called him ugly when he was a she.

And then he sat the staff across from it all. His arsenal of wicked witchery.

Then, he went to bed.

Marlen Ross Child of Apollo * Bar

"So... This is new."

Four walls and a roof, and they hadn't even been ran off yet.

Marlen came back when it started to get really dark around camp. There were lights here or there, but experience told them that darkness meant cold, and cold wasn’t good for living longer. It was a habit of theirs to bunk down by the time dusk hit, unless they were on the run from something or struggling to find a place for the night; They never slept in the same place twice, they risked a few things doing that in a country with so many guns.

They weren’t used to actually staying longer than a nap. And now they had a whole cabin all to themselves.

”Pretty warm in here. Guess you weren’t kidding, old man…” Marlen stared up ay a blank ceiling, it was pitch black beyond the lights outside in the distance. There were no noised of a city, no wild animals in the corner of the room that Marlen had an unspoken truce with, no rain keeping then awake… It was normal here. About as normal as was possible for a bunch of magic half-humans. Like the days back when Marlen wasn't Marlen and they still actually had a family to live with. Now they'd have to actually stay in place, but at least they could take a damn shower without jumping into rivers or standing in the rain.

Marlen closed their eyes and held an arm out in front of them, sitting up and holding a guitar when they opened them again. Quietly, they started playing a tune that fit the mood. They were wondering about a lot of things since Apollo first reared his head after all those years. If Marlen was a demigod, were either of their human parents demigods too? Why hadn't they ever crossed paths with a demigod of Poseidon whenever they were someplace coastal? Or the man himself?

Why hadn't Marlen been summoned sooner, if so many of their kind were here this long?

Why were they here, in the middle of nowhere and not up on a mountain or something?

And what the hell did the gods even want with them?

There was tomorrow, another day to figure it all out. Maybe the gods were going to come down from wherever they were personally, and start giving a speech. Did they even have real bodies, or were they just nebulous things?

They weren't getting much sleep tonight at this rate.

Young Justice

Cora obliterated the holy hell out of a piece of grilled watermelon while Vincent, Erin and Viktor talked about relationships. She'd been single her whole life, so she really didn't know if she had anything meaningful to add there. Honestly, and she wasn’t going to admit it out loud, Cora was surprised Viktor “Emotions? Is that a Martial Art?” Sullivan somehow managed to pull Daphne of all people. That truly was monumental character development of a caliber this universe may never again witness, and it made a grin pop up on her face. Her friends were happy and live was a hell of a lot better now than it was a few weeks ago.

"You guys have been friends for, what, not even a year?" Cora asked. "Considering the things we get up to, it's amazing you're all still here. There was a point where each of us was pretty scared to fight a bad guy, right? And now it's natural. You and Daph might have no idea what you're doing now, but you will one day."

She swiped another bit of food from the grill like a possum robbing humans in the night.

"Whatever goes wrong, it goes wrong for a reason. You'll both figure it out. You deserve to."

The Season of the Enlightened

Location: The Haven

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The door slid shut of its own volition. A heavy click marked it as being closed and locked, immediately after Melody had announced herself. The room was cold. The gas lamps lining the walls were more for light than warmth, reflective surfaces polished into brass that let the light shine over the floor enough for work to be done and little more to offer. Only dead things lay in here, this glorified crypt Morris called a workspace. Morris wheeled around when he heard his name, tense and caught off guard. He didn't have any conniptions with Melody, she was always decent enough to get along with on the occasions they had to interact.

But he looked cornered for a brief moment.

"Melody- Ms. Heathering..." What was going on in his head? Was he about to kill her for stumbling upon his work and seeing how gruesome and dark his Enlightenment could be? Was he simply vexed by the intrusion? He never liked being disturbed. The chemicals he worked with to get just the right conditions under which his abilities could manifest, the air of death tied to him, it wasn't pleasant to him anymore than it was to others. He kept the cards close for reasons.

Behind him, something a head taller and profoundly gaunt was moving. It was skeletal, bearing a head with antlers sawed off to the stumps. The bones of its hands resembled that of a human, or perhaps a bear. It paid no mind to Melody, silently stepping across the floor without so much as a clink of bone on bone. It moved with an odd grace, long limbs collecting vials in one hand, a disc of ivory in the other.

For a quiet moment, he didn't say anything.

"...Yes. Of course," Morris answered, at last. "I am... Preoccupied at the moment, but I can escort you there shortly. If you would, have the others joining you be ready to leave in-"

He stopped talking when Prudence appeared and hit the ground. The door hadn't been opened again, and that meant she had slipped inside when he wasn't looking. He was a little careless entering here, it seemed.

The pokerface turned to an indignant look. "You were spying on me?"